North Korea Rejoins South Korean Time Zone as Peace Offensive Continues
4th May 2018
North Korea has set its clocks forward thirty minutes, joining South Korea on the same time zone, North Korean state media reported a little after midnight Saturday.
“This is the first step in the process of reconciling the national after the historic reunion at the third North-South summit and bringing the North and South together,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported, revealing the standard times of North and South Korea are now the same. The decision to reset the clocks came after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met for the first time on April 27 at a landmark summit on South Korean soil.
North Korea turned its clocks back half an hour in 2015 as a rebuke of the time standards set in place by the “wicked Japanese imperialists.” The South Koreans did the same thing in the mid-1950s, but the country later switched back to encourage bilateral trade between Japan and South Korea.